thoughtbot are creators of the open-sourced testing tools FactoryGirl and
Shoulda Matchers.

We recognize Test-Driven Development (TDD) can be difficult to practice as
features increase in complexity. Testing is often skipped when developers feel
uncomfortable with TDD or have not yet seen certain approaches in practice.

In this session we’ll go off the Rails and take a look at what our Pythonista
cousins are doing with Django.

I’ll start with some live coding: recreating DHH’s infamous 15 minute blog
demo using Django and explaining the building blocks of a Django app along the
way. I’ll then take that app and use it to look at some design decisions
Django makes, and how they compare to Rails. You’ll see convention over
configuration in places you didn’t expect it, why Django doesn’t need
attr_accessible or strong parameters, and how the template method pattern
could change your life.

Why talk about Python at a Rails conference? Seeing another way of doing
things forces us to think about what we’re doing, challenges or validates the
assumptions we make about our work, and inspires us to try new things.

When you’re building a payment platform, you want to make sure that your
system is always available to accept orders. However, the complexity of the
platform introduces the potential for it to go down when any one of the moving
parts fails. In this talk, I will show you the approaches that we’ve taken and
the risks that we have to take to ensure that our platform will always be
available for our customers. Even if you’re not building a payment platform,
these approaches can be applied to ensure a high availability for your
platform or service as well.